Samuel Irving Newhouse (1895-1979) built a multimillion-dollar newspaper, magazine, and radio/ television/cable empire--which his sons Samuel Jr. and Donald continued--by following the trend away from a largely political, crusading press and toward a commercial, profit-oriented media of great enterprises.

Born on May 24, 1895, in New York's Lower East Side, Samuel Irving (usually called S.I.) Newhouse followed a Horatio Alger pattern of rags-to-riches by combining remarkable drive, memory for figures, and talent for picking subordinates with a grass-roots sense of pleasing advertisers and the public.

Newhouse grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey. The oldest of eight children in a Russian immigrant family whose father failed at business, he left school at 13 to become the principal breadwinner. Soon he became involved in nursing the troubled Bayonne Times newspaper to health, learning lessons that he applied in later life.

The key was raising revenue by gaining retail advertising through aggressive...